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Thursday, January 16, 2003 |
If the phones are so smart, why can't they tell when the annoying telemarketers are calling?
The Move to Smartphones Has Begun. Smartphones to Dominate by 2008
"A migration trend is emerging among wireless users toward feature rich devices that incorporate color screens and advanced data and messaging applications, including navigation, multimedia messaging (MMS), and instant messaging, among others. According to a new Allied Business Intelligence study, this trend will by 2008 almost have eradicated mobile phones as we know them today - leaving Smartphones as the evolutionary winner....
The study claims that the number of replacement handsets shipped will grow from 211 million in 2002 to 591 million units in 2008, representing nearly 85% of all shipments worldwide at that time.
Only about 15% of the estimated 406 million handsets shipped in 2002 incorporated color displays. The study expects this number to jump to 97% by 2008, signaling a goodbye to monochrome handsets - hopefully with improved battery life for color handsets, as one of the major drawbacks of current smartphones relates to poor battery life." [infoSync]
Resistance is futile. Your library had better be prepared to offer its services to smartphone users well before 2008. It's already 2003.... [The Shifted Librarian]
6:37:18 AM 
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Pssst! This Note's for You
"Geo-caching is fun, but the most intriguing new applications of GPS may end up transforming everyone's sense of physical space. What if you think of GPS as a kind of 3-D version of the Internet, a hypertext Web spun out in real-world geography?
GPS is based on the fundamental geometric principle of trilateration: If you know your distance from three distinct points, then you know your exact position on a map. (If you're interested in altitude as well, you need four points.) GPS receivers coordinate with a system of 24 satellites maintained by the Department of Defense. Because these satellites follow predictable orbits, their exact location at any given time is easy to determine. A GPS receiver in your car or on your personal digital assistant (PDA) receives radio signals from satellites overhead and gauges its distance from each satellite by calculating how long it takes the signals to arrive. Before 2000, the military deliberately scrambled GPS signals for consumer use to limit the precision of location readings. However, today the accuracy range of ordinary receivers is typically 30 feet. (Some high-end models, using several frequencies, can generate accurate location readings to within a foot.)...
The great breakthrough on the GPS horizon lies in thinking of those geographic coordinates as a real-world URL. In other words, think of those digits not simply as a description of a point in space but as a place to store information. Today you can create a Web address and publish pages and pages of anything you want there. But soon you'll be able to take a GPS location[~]say, 40°43.833' N, 073°59.814' W, the coordinates for Washington Square Park in New York[~]and publish material there as well. Anyone walking through the park would then be able to browse through the data you've uploaded. Some of this information might be targeted at a general audience and include recommendations for nearby restaurants, or a public bulletin board for discussing improvements to the park itself. But the messages stored might also be more personal, such as diary entries stored at the very place where the events described in the diary occurred, a kind of first-person geo-cache. There might even be bits of text targeted at a specific person, like an e-mail message floating in space, waiting for its recipient to come into range and receive it.
IBM researcher J. C. Spohrer, who helped concoct an early prototype for a GPS-based hypertext called WorldBoard, describes this kind of system as a 'planetary chalkboard.' I prefer to think of it as a kind of graffiti that makes an environment more habitable and socially connected....
The planetary chalkboard will become interesting only when ordinary people can pick up a piece of chalk and write something.
'Instead of having just tourist information, the system would be open,' says Swedish researcher Fredrik Espinoza, cocreator of an experimental tool called GeoNotes. "There would be much more social activity." Espinoza's vision includes a filtering system for retrieving GeoNotes that have been posted by friends or other trusted sources, like the buddy list of Instant Messaging. Imagine, for instance, that you stumble across a beautiful side street in a historic district, the sort of urban discovery you might tell your friends about the next time you meet them for coffee. With GPS-based hypertext, you could leave a virtual note hanging near the street, addressed to your 30 closest friends. The next time they happened to stumble through the area, the text would pop up on their PDA screens: 'Hey, come check this out...'
William Gibson, the sci-fi writer who coined the term cyberspace, once wrote: 'The street finds its own uses for things, uses the manufacturers never imagined.' His words are inevitably rolled out when describing some unlikely new grassroots application of an existing tool, like geo-caching. But software such as GeoNotes or WorldBoard suggests a further twist: The street finds new uses for the street itself. Simply strolling down the sidewalk can become a hypertextual exploration, a journey into a new information space layered over the real one. Suddenly the surrounding air is full of information[~]some of it created for you by your closest friends, some of it created by total strangers. The streets are alive with data." [Discover, via stevenberlinjohnson.com] [The Shifted Librarian]
6:35:18 AM
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Discussing Wi-Fi in a forum: Don't forget that I started up a forum to talk about any Wi-Fi issues (hot spots, operating systems, etc.) at the Wireless Networking Starter Kit site. The system allows simple threaded Web-based discussions. Join now! [80211b News]
6:28:42 AM
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North Carolina paper explores mom-and-pop-Fi: Another article on the growing trend of small entrepreneurs setting up efficient, high-speed, targeted wireless networks in areas underserved or not served at all by DSL and cable modems. The demand is there, but a patchwork of small providers may be better equipped to handle the particular demands of the community through trust (it's a neighbor) and small investments. [80211b News]
6:22:07 AM
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Bagging Explorer. eWeek likes Safari. So do I. It's now the default browser on my OS X laptop. A brief wish list: - Tabbed browsing
- Editable (not just purgeable) History
- Autocomplete form-filling
- One-click selection of the URL in the location bar (progressively coloring the location window as the page loads [~] making it a progress bar[~] is a clever touch, but it misleads the user into thinking the text there is highlighted when it's not... and when the user would like it to be)
- Image icon generation for images dragged to directories
The same list, of course, extends to Mozilla, Konqueror and every other browser that lacks any or all of those features. [Later...] Oops. Two of those wishes are already apparently fulfilled. Specifically, #s 2 and 4. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
6:16:34 AM
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San Francisco Gate - Discarded computer hard drives prove a trove of personal info. So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of? Two MIT graduate students suggest you think again. Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat bought 158 used hard drives at secondhand computer stores and on eBay. Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" -- medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year's worth of transactions with account numbers from a cash machine in Illinois. [ ... ] Last spring, Pennsylvania sold used computers that contained information about state employees. In 1997, a Nevada woman bought a used computer and discovered it contained prescription records on 2,000 customers of an Arizona pharmacy. Garfinkel and Shelat, who reported their findings in an article to be published Friday in the journal IEEE Security & Privacy, said they believe they are the first to take a more comprehensive -- though not exactly scientific -- look at the problem. [ ... ] Even reformatting a drive, or preparing the hard drive all over again to store files, may not do it. Fifty-one of the 129 working drives in the MIT study had been reformatted, and 19 of them still contained recoverable data. [Privacy Digest]
5:32:03 AM
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NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) - Protect Yourself and NASA Before Getting Rid of That Old Home Computer . Thinking about upgrading or replacing your old home computer? While this purchase will invoke considerable choices, let's not forget about that old PC you may be looking to replace. Many of these systems are candidates for resale, charitable donation to schools or churches, or perhaps setting out for trash collection. Unfortunately, your good intentions can be where your nightmare begins. Unless you take the proper precautions, getting rid of your home computer might be your personal introduction to one of the fastest growing crimes in America--Identity-theft. This theft, or fraud, is the taking of the victim's identity to open credit card accounts, make purchases, take out loans, or order false checks and ATM cards in your name. Basically, all that an identity "thief" needs is your birth date, social security number and any other identifying information, such as your address and phone number.[ ... ] [Privacy Digest]
5:31:05 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Paul W. Swansen.
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